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Know Your Tools: Why Mockitos when() works

Some days ago, my colleague asked how Mockito can differentiate between a method invocation outside of an expectation and one inside. If you want to know it too, read on.

The difference

Typically a mocking framework follows a Record/Replay/Verify model. In the first phase the expectations are recorded, in the second the mocked methods are called by the code under test and finally the expectations are verified. Consider an example with EasyMock straight from their documentation:

The invocation of get() is evaluated before the invocations of when() or println() so there is no way to change the phase before the call. There is also no way to tell whether the current expectation is the last to start the replay mode automatically. How does it work then? All necessary code is contained in the following classes: MockitoCore, MockHandlerImpl, OngoingStubbing and MockingProgressImpl with its wrapper ThreadSafeMockingProgress.

Record

In the second line, a mock is created via the mock method. This call is delegated to MockitoCore, which initiates a creation of a proxy and a registration of MockHandlerImpl as the handler for its invocations.

The third line actually contains three steps. First the method to mock is invoked on the mock. Because MockHandlerImpl has been registered for all method calls on this proxy, it is now called. It keeps the current invocation, adds it to the list of all invocations recorded and creates the object to collect the expectations, the “OngoingStubbing”. The instance of OngoingStubbing is stored in an instance of the MockingProgressImpl. To keep the instance between the calls to the framework, a ThreadLocal member of singleton ThreadSafeMockingProgress is used. Since no mocked answer for the call to mock exists, a default result is returned. The second step is the invocation of when(), which returns the instance of OngoingStubbing previously deposited by MockHandlerImpl in MockingProgressImpl. OngoingStubbing implements the method then(), which is used as a means of recording the expected result in the third step. The result and the cached invocation are then saved together, ready to be retrieved. During this process, the invocation call is “consumed” and removed from the list of recorded invocations.

Replay

//replay
System.out.println(mockedList.get(0));

In the line five the method get() is called again. Since the result for it has been defined, MockHandlerImpl returns the retrieved result to the caller. The call is recorded and stored for for further use.

Verify

//verify
verify(mockedList).get(0);

Verification also consists of multiple steps. The call to verify() marks the end of stubbing and sets the verification mode. In the following call to get() on the basis of set verification mode MockHandlerImpl is able to differentiate between the phases and passes the invocations recorded to the verification code.

Final thoughts

The developers of Mockito achieved much with simple constructs like singletons and shared state. The stuff behind the syntax sugar is sometimes even considered magic. I hope that, after reading this article, you no longer believe in magic but use your knowledge to create similar great frameworks.

Another point: Since Mockito uses ThreadLocal as storage for its state, is it possible to confuse it by using multiple threads? What do you think?